The Home Place: A Novel Page 3

  Down on the street, Alma grabs her taxi north, charges up to the condo to throw a few things in a bag, kisses Jean-Marc, and rushes south to catch the 9:50 Alaska Airlines direct flight to Billings. It’s good timing, dying on a Sunday morning, Alma reflects with a morose half smile as they race down I-5. Any other day of the week and she’d never have made the flight.

  CHAPTER 3

  SUNDAY, 12:30 P.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME

  Billings lies in the Yellowstone River valley, framed by vertical Sacrifice Cliff and the stunning outcrop known locally as the rimrocks, which together give the city a broad canyon feel. The south side, along the river and the interstate, is a fortress of refineries and industrial space. The sweet spot is farther north, where many visitors never penetrate—the quaint older neighborhoods, the gracious parks, the colleges. In her memory Alma forgets the rough spots and remembers only the sunny hometown embrace.

  The plane comes in low toward the rims. Alma looks for landmarks. She learned to drive down there on Black Otter Trail. No guardrail, no pavement, just an old Jeep with a stiff manual transmission, that was Grandpa Al’s idea of a proper initiation. The fairgrounds and the downtown towers, the river and the south hills, the Beartooths snowy and radiant in the distance, it’s all as it always has been. She could trace the geography and the architecture with her eyes closed. The wheels touch tarmac and the peculiar thrill of coming home to native ground rivets Alma. She is oriented once more.

  She lets out her breath and wonders when she began to hold it. It’s been a very long time. Here her dead are buried—and at the moment, unburied—her many kin are living, her ghosts stand vigil, and she is known, she is home. When she turns on her phone, there’s a voice mail from Detective Curtis asking her to visit the Billings Clinic morgue.

  Nobody greets her. After five years the airport is different, more upscale, but without the god-awful western kitsch Alma associates with ski resort towns. In the new service economy that relies on magnificent mountain views, high-speed quads, and destination spa ranches, Billings is inconveniently placed. The city turns more naturally toward the east and the south, farms and ranches, oil and gas, the parts of the state only a real Montanan could love, where the magnificence of the Rockies gives way to sugar beet fields and sagebrush buttes. The land of Custer and the Crow, where in the worst weather the state troopers shut big steel gates across the on-ramps, because now as in earlier days this country is sometimes too dangerous to dare.

  The Terrebonnes have survived for centuries in the North American wilds on wits and kinship. To cross the territory of the warlike Lakota, they traveled at night, took the white canvas off their wagons, and carried tobacco for trade and bribery. The old man, Alphonse Terrebonne, took pride in never carrying a gun and spoke Indian sign language well enough to get himself invited to join camp. The story Grandpa Al told Alma was of his own grandfather, Alphonse’s son, who nearly opened fire on a group of mounted Lakota who surrounded the wagons one morning, shouting and firing into the air. But Alphonse grabbed his arm. “Look,” he said, “they’re not in war paint. If you want something to do, go join them.” The younger man mounted up and rode into the circle, to the delight of the Lakota, who invited the Terrebonnes’ party to camp with them that night. Alphonse handed down through the generations the code of the voyageur along with a stern lesson: Never fight an Indian. He’s defending his land, and considering who we are, he might be your kin.

  Alma’s red Mitsubishi rental sedan has antilock brakes and front wheel drive, for which she is immediately grateful as she downshifts to take the steep hill to the valley floor. The view hasn’t changed, coal plant and refineries puffing in the middle distance, MSU-Billings standing steady in brick against the backdrop of the rims, the breadth of Twenty-Seventh Street cutting straight to the river.

  Alma heads the car toward the massive hospital complex growing inexorably outward from North Twenty-Seventh Street, consuming a charming old neighborhood. This is the place she came in the ambulance with Vicky, right after the accident, Alma’s scrapes barely meriting notice next to her sister’s crushed leg and internal injuries. She remembers family beginning to arrive as she sat in the corner of a surgical waiting room, wrapped in a blanket, resisting the attentions of a hovering nurse. She remembers a uniformed police officer inquiring in a low, tentative voice about what she’d seen. She refused to say a word, or even look at him. Tense conversation hummed around her, but her mind was still out on the interstate, wandering, terrified. “Man up,” Alma whispers to herself. She parks, squares her shoulders, and marches in.

  The main reception atrium is full of glass and light, with a grand piano where an elderly volunteer is playing Sinatra. She should have called Pete, she realizes now, but it’s too late. She’s been spotted. A heavy blonde wearing a name tag is sitting within a circular reception desk. “Alma? Alma Terrebonne? Well hello there! Don’t you remember me? It’s Sarah Marquardt, or Sarah Jessup now.” She gestures at the name tag. “We were in speech class together. I joined the navy, remember?” Sarah is wearing head-to-toe surgical scrubs with the top printed in Hawaiian Mickey and Minnie Mouse figures.

  “I— You— Do you work in pediatrics?” Alma fumbles for words.

  Sarah blinks. “What? Oh, my scrubs, you mean—no, I just think they put people at ease. Everyone’s so tense walking in that door. I like to give them something to smile at.”

  “Oh, sure.” Alma nods. This is what always throws her about Montana—being recognized, remembered, everywhere she goes, like a lesser celebrity. But Sarah’s good people. They were in marching band together too. Sarah could always be counted on to know the routine. “Good idea. What happened with you? You got out of the navy and came back here?”

  “Yeah, I married Scott Jessup. He was two years ahead of us.” Alma remembers Scott dating a mean little cheerleader named Shelly. He’s better off with Sarah. “He’s farming his folks’ place east of here, and I’m working until the next baby comes.” Sarah rolls her chair back to reveal a rounded belly on an already substantial frame. “We’ve already got one, little Micah, so after this one it’s full-time mom duty for me! Are you visiting someone? Can I look up a room number for you?”

  “No.” Alma feels an awkward silence rise between them before she figures out what to say next. “I have to go to the morgue. My sister died last night.” Her throat constricts as she admits this. Is there still some chance they could be wrong? Shouldn’t she feel different—know somehow—if Vicky is really dead?

  “Oh my God!” Sarah pushes back her sandy blond hair with both hands. “Oh God, I always put my foot in it. I’m so sorry. Hang on, just hang on and I’ll find someone to take you down.” Sarah picks up the phone and speaks in a low, urgent voice. Alma backs away a few feet, but Sarah holds up a hand to stop her. “Wait, wait! Someone will be right down. Alma, don’t take this the wrong way, honey, but you look like hell. What can I get for you? Coffee? Tea? Nice shot of whiskey?”

  Alma raises her eyebrows.

  “Kidding. Although I’ve thought about keeping a bottle in the bottom drawer.” Sarah’s conspiratorial laugh turns into a little sigh. “It’s what a lot of folks really need.”

  “A coffee would be nice, thanks.” Alma offers up a smile in recognition of Sarah’s kind humor. “Black, no sugar.”

  “Sure thing. And hey, I don’t mean you look bad. You look great, actually. I love that scarf. Just . . . like you’ve been hit by a truck, you know? In shock. You can have my chair. I’ll be right back.”

  Sarah rises and hurries toward the coffee shop in a corner of the atrium. Alma sinks into the desk chair. A middle-aged couple walks up to the desk. Alma gestures vaguely in Sarah’s direction without making eye contact. The pair look around, confused, but too rural polite to demand attention from someone unwilling to offer it. Sarah is back in nearly superhuman time with coffee and gestures urgently at a candy striper who’s just appeared from a long hallway to their left.

  “This is Jenni
e. She’ll show you down to the morgue. You know the way, right, Jennie?”

  Jennie is a high schooler with badly cut short blond hair and glasses. Her red and white pinafore is too big for her and held in place with safety pins above her scuffed white Crocs. “I think so,” she says, biting her lip. “I mean, it’s only my second day, but I looked at the map.”

  Sarah looks concerned. “Maybe I should take you down, hon,” she begins.

  Alma shakes her head. The last thing she wants is hometown interrogation in the key of effusive blonde. “No, Jennie and I will be just fine. Thanks for the coffee.”

  They set off at a quick pace, Jennie’s Crocs making squeaking sounds on the linoleum. They descend in the elevator and begin to traverse a part of the hospital that looks like original construction. Alma forces down the bitter coffee, one long swallow after another, wishing the cup were bigger. She feels sleepy, ready to lie down in the corridor and nap curled against the wall.

  “It’s only my second day,” Jennie repeats as they take turn after turn without arriving at any destination. The heating pipes overhead make the air oppressive and the walls are a yellowish block that sweats. When Alma brushes up against a wall, it’s slick and slimy. She feels sweat break out on her lower back and takes off her coat and scarf.

  Jennie grows agitated as they wander through serpentine basement corridors. At last, through retracing their steps, they find a locked steel door with a telephone beside it and a tiny plastic plate that reads MORGUE. Jennie calls in to announce Alma, then flees. The hot, damp corridor returns to perfect silence.

  The door opens after a long minute to reveal a short, round, cheerful man, the sort of character who’d be better cast as a satyr than as Charon. He wears a bright yellow disposable smock and purple latex gloves, making his appearance all the more a clownlike non sequitur. “Hi there, I’m Larry Sears,” he announces, and peels off a glove to shake Alma’s hand. “I’m assistant to the coroner. I’m really sorry you had to come down here for this. I’ll try to make it as quick as possible.”

  The room he lets her into is nothing but a small antechamber to an office with an autopsy room beyond. Alma tries not to look through to the steel examination table and the instruments arrayed beside the sinks and along the walls, but they draw her eyes. It’s impossible not to feel like a voyeur. She wants to look everywhere at once, to stare. Larry seems not to notice. He offers Alma a low plastic chair, then unlocks the heavy steel door that guards the cooler. As he swings open the door, a smell drifts out—like Alma’s high school biology classroom on the day they dissected frogs, not strong but evocative. She threw up in one of the lab sinks that day. Now she sits still and is thankful for the chair.

  Larry rolls out a steel gurney with a thick black pad. On top lies a heavy blue bag. He locks the gurney wheels, stands next to the head, and gestures for Alma to stand opposite him. “I’ll unzip the shroud enough to see her face, and all you have to do is nod yes or no,” he says. He waits until Alma is in position, looks her over to be sure she’s steady, then opens the shroud.

  Vicky’s face is clean. Someone has wiped away the rest of the blood that still crusts at the edge of her mouth and combed her long, dark hair. Her features are a little puffy, bruised by postmortem lividity, but it’s definitely her, all the Hopkins and Terrebonne genes pooled in her high cheekbones and long nose, so like Alma’s that sometimes they could pass as each other with strangers when they were younger, even though Alma is five years older. The resemblance is strongest beside a campfire, when the low light draws out their bone structure. This is Alma’s face, herself—the but-for-the-grace-of-God scenario. She mouths the words: There but for the grace of God go I. She has repeated them to herself many times as a talisman against hubris, and always when she says them she thinks of Vicky, that other self, living out the bitter, addictive abandon that is the flip side of Alma’s compulsive work ethic and white-knuckled self-control.

  Alma wants to grab the gurney with both hands and howl her anger until Sarah hears her upstairs. Is this what had to happen, this brutal last moment together, the face of the living looking into the young, bruised face of the dead? From a place detached from her body, Alma feels herself go cold. She puts out a hand toward a scrape along the side of Vicky’s face, where she must have fallen on the ice, and lets her fingers rest on the cool skin. The scrape still looks raw and painful, although Vicky of course no longer feels anything. Her reckless heart is finally still. She used to call Alma early in the morning—Alma off at college or in law school, Vicky an angry teenager who blamed their parents for everything and for dying most of all, then a high-school dropout living in a Section 8 basement apartment in Billings with a colicky baby and passive, minimum-wage Dennis on the night shift—to talk about the nightmare she’d been having when Brittany woke her up. Maybe she woke Brittany with her own screaming, she wasn’t sure, but Vicky remembered the nightmares in every disturbing detail.

  Vicky was running across a dark college campus, among dark Gothic arches and gargoyles, trying to get to Alma’s dorm room. She’d be safe there, and more than that, in the dream she was sure that everything she wanted was there, if only she could find the place, get inside, and bolt the door. But where was Alma? Alma knew the way. Why wouldn’t she help? Or the water dreams: Vicky was underwater and couldn’t get to the surface, didn’t know which way was up. It was dark and murky in the depths of Vicky’s dreams and she didn’t know how to swim, this girl who’d spent summer afternoons with Alma retrieving pennies from the bottom of the diving well at the pool and cannonballing until the lifeguards made them stop. Sometimes it was Alma herself holding her down, Vicky said, clambering over her to the surface, kicking free of Vicky’s grasp to save herself.

  Vicky talked about college once in a while and said maybe she’d finish her GED and enroll in a few classes, get started. How was that going to happen, Alma always wondered, with the baby, the job, rent due, constant child care problems, and the gang of hard-partying friends Vicky was still hanging out with? Who was she kidding?

  Alma grew exhausted with the calls. The nightmares were so similar, and there was nothing Alma could do, no words of comfort that would mean anything from a thousand miles away. What did Vicky want from her? Didn’t she understand how hard it was for Alma just to keep her head above water at a place like Yale Law, then at the firm, without answering these panicked phone calls every few nights?

  Then one night in the middle of a huge work crunch, when Alma had been pulling repeated all-nighters on a deal and was trying to get some solid sleep before an important presentation to the firm’s managing committee the next morning, the phone rang. Alma knew who it had to be and answered anyway. It was another of Vicky’s nightmares, followed by the dramatic tale of a recent breakup. Halfway through the predictable description of an alcoholic, adrenaline-junkie boyfriend with commitment issues—was there any other kind of man in Montana under the age of thirty?—Alma just couldn’t do it anymore.

  “Vicky, isn’t there someone else you could tell this to? I’ve got to get some sleep,” she muttered in frustration, face half buried in a pillowcase that needed washing.

  A long silence followed. “No.” Vicky’s tone sounded accusatory. “There’s nobody.” She hung up. It was the last really open conversation they’d had, even in the intervening years when Brittany had come to Seattle several times to visit, with tickets Alma bought. A wall had gone up.

  Alma has a detailed memory of how, at Al’s funeral, Vicky slipped out to her car with Brittany the moment the last hymn began. Alma jogged out of the church after her, trailed by Greg Severson, her own boyfriend at the time, and trapped Vicky at the curb by planting herself at the driver’s window. Vicky never got out of the car, never turned off the music, never looked Alma in the eye. Greg waited on the sidewalk, staring back and forth between them as if he didn’t trust his eyes at Vicky’s eerily familiar profile.

  “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you,” Alma pleaded. “C
an we talk a little?”

  “What about?”

  “Anything. How you’re doing. Brittany’s school. Bad boyfriends.” Alma tried to make a joke and winked at Greg. A little family foolishness, nothing abnormal, nothing to see here.

  Vicky sneered. “You don’t get to care about our lives every couple of years when you have a few minutes free.” She threw a contemptuous glance at buttoned-down Greg.

  “I always care about your life, bug.” The old nickname slipped out. “Most of the time I’m just trying to keep my head above water.”

  “Fine. Go. Swim. Do whatever it is you do.” Vicky tapped a pack of cigarettes against the steering wheel. Alma wanted to snatch the pack from her sister’s hands, slap her face, do anything that would snap Vicky out of the snide drawl. She went with a different tack.

  “Can Brittany stay with us the rest of the afternoon? I haven’t seen her in so long.”

  “Go play your do-gooder act somewhere else. I’ll get by just fine on my own. I have to get to work.” She spoke staring straight ahead, spitting out the phrases between puffs on her cigarette. And then, without warning, she pulled away fast like always, in a cloud of angry blue smoke, Alma careening out of the path of the car. Brittany twisted in her seat to watch her aunt recede.

  Now Alma looks down at Vicky for the last time. There will be the funeral, but this is the last time together, the only opportunity to speak whatever words Alma has for Vicky’s unhearing ears. Alma has always imagined the eventual reconciliation, how they’d sit down together one day at Pete’s coffee and pool house up by the college and laugh about growing up. Their estrangement was never meant to be forever, only a little hiccup. The silence between symphonic movements. Alma glances at Larry, but he has folded his hands and is looking at the ceiling, letting Alma take as much time as she likes.